Efficient match pair selection for oblique UAV images based on adaptive vocabulary tree

The primary contribution of this paper is an efficient match pair selection method for oblique unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) images. First, high overlap degrees and spatial resolutions cause image and feature redundancies in vocabulary tree building and image indexing. To cope with this issue, an image selection strategy and a feature selection strategy are designed to decrease the total number of features. Second, by analysing the distribution of the similarity scores, an adaptive threshold selection method is implemented to determine the number of candidate match pairs for each query image, and it avoids the disadvantages of the fixed number and fixed proportion methods. Then, an algorithm, termed AVT-Expansion, is proposed for the match pair selection and simplification where the initial match pairs are first selected by using the adaptive vocabulary tree (AVT). To simplify the initial match pairs, the AVT method is integrated with our previous MST-Expansion algorithm, which is used to extract a match graph by analysing the image topological connection network. Finally, the proposed method is verified using three UAV datasets captured with different oblique multi-camera systems. Experimental results demonstrate that the efficiency of the vocabulary tree building is improved, with speed-up ratios ranging from 14 to 16, and that high image retrieval precision values are obtained for the three datasets. For match pair selection of oblique UAV images, the proposed method is an efficient solution.